IEEPA tariff refunds: what a CAPE declaration needs

On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court held in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that the tariffs the President imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, collected since 3 February 2025, were unlawful. What follows is the largest customs refund exercise anyone has attempted, and CBP has described how it will work in a Paperwork Reduction Act notice, the dullest document class in the Federal Register and the one that tells you what you will have to do.

The numbers CBP puts on its own problem:

The tariffs assessed under IEEPA from February 3, 2025 to February 24, 2026 total an estimated $166 billion, with over 53 million entry summaries requiring processing in order to issue accurate refunds with required interest.

Entry summary by entry summary, the agency says, it cannot do this. So it built a tool.

CAPE, and what a declaration is

CAPE is the Consolidated Administration and Processing of Entries, reached through the ACE Portal. CBP’s definition of the thing you file is one sentence: “The request for a refund that is filed through CAPE is called a ‘CAPE Declaration’.”

Mechanically it is a spreadsheet:

an IOR, or their broker, will submit a Comma-Separated Values (CSV) file with a list of entry summary numbers to the CAPE tool through the ACE Portal. Depending on the CAPE Declaration, this file may contain only a few lines of data or thousands of lines of data (there is a limit of 9,999 entries per CAPE Declaration).

One declaration can cover thousands of entry summaries and resolve to a single payment, deposited directly into the importer’s account. CBP will screen and validate the file before accepting it; a rejected file comes back to be fixed and resubmitted.

Two preconditions are easy to miss and both will stop a refund dead. Only ACE account holders can file, and where a broker files on an importer’s behalf the broker must be the designated notify party in the ACE account. And payment is by ACH only. CBP says the Federal Government no longer disburses paper checks, that it is currently holding refunds for filers with no ACH account on file in ACE, and that it will do the same here.

The qualifying test is a date, not a product

This is the part that decides how much money you are owed, and it has nothing to do with what you imported. The Court of International Trade’s order reaches

any and all unliquidated entries that were entered subject to the IEEPA duties

and any “liquidated entries for which liquidation is not final”.

Both halves of that are liquidation questions. An entry that has not yet liquidated is in. An entry that liquidated and whose 180-day protest window under 19 U.S.C. § 1514(c)(3) has expired is final and conclusive on everyone, the United States included, and is out. In between sits a set of entries whose status depends entirely on dates nobody sent you: under 19 CFR § 159.9(c)(1) the legally operative notice of liquidation is a posting on cbp.gov, and the message that reaches the filer is expressly “an informal, courtesy notice and not as a direct, formal, and decisive notice of liquidation”.

Two further timing rules matter here. An entry nobody liquidates inside a year is deemed liquidated by operation of law at the figure the importer asserted (§ 159.11(a)), so silence does not keep an entry open indefinitely. And § 159.12(a)(2) allows the one-year period to be “suspended as required by statute or court order”, which is the mechanism holding large blocks of these entries open while the litigation runs.

So the eligibility question for any given box is: when did this entry liquidate, and is that still inside 180 days? If the answer lives in a broker’s portal and an email thread, it is not an answer.

The hour CBP budgeted, and the hours it did not

CBP’s burden table is honest about what it is measuring: 330,000 respondents, one response each on average times 1.5, one hour per response, 495,000 burden hours in total.

That hour is the filing. Everything in front of it is unmeasured:

• Pulling every entry summary number from 3 February 2025 onward where an IEEPA line was paid, across however many brokers you use.
• Establishing each entry’s liquidation status against a website, not an inbox.
• Reconciling the duty actually paid per entry to the figure in your own costing, so the refund can be checked when it arrives rather than accepted on faith.

For scale, the desk baseline this site publishes puts the whole of status tracking and reporting at 20 to 30 minutes per container and payment tracking at 10 to 15, inside a total of about 2.2 hours of desk work per container. A desk running 500 containers a month has, over the IEEPA window, several thousand entries to classify by a status it has never had to record. CBP’s hour covers the upload.

What this is really a test of

An IEEPA refund is money the government owes the importer, calculated from records the importer is assumed to have: which entries carried the duty, what each one paid, and where each one stands in its liquidation cycle. Most desks hold the first as a pile of broker invoices, the second inside an accounting system that netted it into cost of goods, and the third nowhere at all.

That is the same gap that makes a late document expensive, seen from the other end. The importer of record carries the liability for the duty and also the right to the refund, and in both directions the thing that decides the outcome is a dated record somebody kept. Treating the duty line as closed at clearance is what makes this hard; landed cost tracking software that keeps the entry open until it liquidates is what makes it a query.

No date has been set for payment. CBP says the court has signalled that refunds be issued as quickly as possible because of the accrual of interest, and that the court “is closely monitoring CBP’s progress … and can lift the suspension of its order at any time”. The 30-day comment notice on the collection was published on 5 October 2026 at 91 FR 63299, with comments due by 4 November 2026 through reginfo.gov. The sensible reading is that the list will be wanted sooner than it is convenient to build, which is an argument for building it now.

What changed between the two notices

The 30-day notice repeats the 60-day notice of 8 July almost word for word, and the one substantive difference is a deletion. The July text ended its small-business paragraph with an offer:

Based on public comments received, CBP may develop an alternative process for small businesses if it is determined that using ACE and CAPE is overly burdensome for those businesses.

The October text stops one sentence earlier. Small importers are still described as not having an ACE account and as expected to use their brokers; the possibility of a route around ACE is no longer on the page. Comments on the 60-day notice closed on 8 September, so the sentence was dropped after CBP had read them rather than before.

Nothing else of substance moved. The burden table is the same — 330,000 respondents filing 1.5 declarations each at an hour apiece, plus a second collection of 33,000 CSV file replacements at half an hour, which is CBP budgeting for roughly one filing in ten to come back rejected. The one other edit is the collection’s own name: “CVS File” in July, “CSV File” in October.